Go Green School of the Week: Harvest Park Middle School in Pleasanton, CA!

That's right folks, the Go Green Initiative announced their new "School of the Week" honors recently, and this week's winner is Harvest Park Middle School in Pleasanton, CA. They were the first middle school to adopt the Go Green Initiative way back in 2003, and since then they've got students and teachers on board recycling paper, plastic, aluminum, ink cartridges and cell phones. Wow!

But the reason they've won top honors this week is that they've put a highly successful program in place to collect food scraps along with their accompanying paper wrappers and the like in 90 gallon tote containers, ultimately sending them off for composting. To pull it off they've teamed up with their local waste hauler, the Pleasanton Garbage Service, which supplied eight of the totes and picks them up three times a week. Today they're diverting an incredible 2,160 gallons of compostable material from landfills a week while teaching students about the value of composting in the process.Not surprisingly, the addition of a successful food composting program at lunch has actually increased the rate of recycling for plastic and aluminum in their school as well. A great example of how one great program reinforces another.